“Lick an orange, it tastes like an orange.” Mr. Wonka gestures towards the wall. “Lick a pineapple, it tastes like a pineapple. Go ahead, try it!” He continues to gesture excitedly. “The strawberries taste like strawberries! The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!” The group of wary but curious factory-goers crowd the wall, tongues extended, scarcely believing their taste buds as they lick the fruit painted on strips in front of them.
“This was always my favorite scene as a kid,” Baudrillard intones from his lounged position on the couch next to me. We’re sitting in the living room of his studio apartment in Los Angeles, watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the wall-sized screen in front of us. Never having seen the movie in such eye-popping definition, I had to admit: those snozzberries did look pretty real. The reality-bending quality of the televised picture had its drawbacks, however – only a few scenes later, I had to restrain from laughing. I could practically feel the plastic of the candy trees in Wonka’s world of Pure Imagination.
I asked Adam if he found the clearly fake set distracting, and as he scratched at his patchy beard he told me, “Well, I’ve been watching this since I was a kid. I know it’s fake. So I don’t really feel like the movie is real, I don’t believe the magic per se, but I feel like I’m an extra on set, you know? Like I’m watching the magic be created in front of me.” It was comments like these which reminded me that, despite his casual appearance, Adam Baudrillard is not your ordinary man. As the first person in the world to reach over half a billion subscribers on the popular social media app ICON, Adam knew a thing or two about magic and its creation. This was a man who thrived in the unnoticeable gaps between the self and the screen.
When it was released for iOS and Android in January, everyone knew that ICON was going to blow-up. The parent company behind the app, SimSource, was already a huge name in the technological field of NLP and Computer Vision, working closely with companies like ByteDance to produce AI-assisted recognition software. On top of this, SimSource is a behemoth in the entertainment industry, running the highest-grossing and most-watched television program of all time (which just last month also boasted the largest cast in history). Reel is the latest and greatest addition to the canon of “social experiment” television, joining Big Brother and The Circle as the hottest rated and most watched shows today. What set Reel apart is the ingenious premise: using the partner app, ReelVote, users can vote on the content they wish to see aired on the next episode. The catch: all content is user submitted.
By linking ReelVote to their other social media apps (Twitter, TikTok, FaceBook, SnapChat, etc) users can submit videos of themselves performing, doing dances, singing songs, or doing anything else they would do in their daily lives. As long as they don’t violate the app’s Community Guidelines, user submissions will be uploaded to the app and broadcast to everyone else. Users on the app then vote on which submissions they like the most, swiping between clips with an interface similar to that of the popular dating app Tinder: swipe right to send a video to the next round of voting – swipe left to…swipe left. The second and final round of voting has users vote on which character they wish for each submission to be applied to.
With a constantly updating roster of characters, Reel soon exploded as people began to try and form their own narratives, their own characters, and their own plots. People started trends where certain dances and certain actions became popular, all with specific characters in mind whom they wished to see bring those actions to life on the big screen. Communities began to pop-up in support of one character or another, and soon it took entire web catalogues to trace the twists and turns of the plot.
From this success SimSource then struck gold: ICON. It is impossible to overstate how revolutionary this app was. Having already created an entirely new kind of television, SimSource then solidified their place in the media pantheon by fundamentally changing social media forever. Unlike typical social media where users create profiles based on themselves, ICON was the first time where users would create profiles based on television characters from their favorite TV show, Reel. The genius was breaking down every movement, word, facial expression, and action into distinct and seperate parts. Rather than be forced to stay true to one character, users could pick and choose which qualities and aspects they wished to use for their own ICON profile.
Such a feat is only possible because of the incredible power of the SimSource technology. By using the newest advances in motion-capture and AI-assisted rendering, users can create full profiles for their fictional ICONs, giving them unique personalities and histories with whatever conglomeration of traits and actions they deem fit. People can create any face they wish (Susan’s eyes, Martin’s nose, Marge’s hair, perhaps?), any body they wished (Brian’s height, Joan’s build, Fred's skin color?), and simulate their avatar (or ICON) doing any action, dance, or movement that aired on Reel.Once their profiles are set up, users can comment on other people’s profiles, tag their “friends”, create content together, and generally do everything one would typically do on any other social media. The power of SimSource technology is such that, when scrolling through the simple yet intuitive app interface, one never gets the feeling that all the people are anything but real. Dubbed “The single most powerful Social Media ever made” by Wired Magazine, ICON exploded as people discovered an entirely new way to connect to each other.
Which, of course, brings us back to Adam. Originally just a minor presence in the app, Adam soon proved himself a genius. Perfectly picking and choosing which qualities, which attributes, which characteristics he thought would be the most successful, Adam’s popularity skyrocketed. Everyone wanted to be friends with him, and he was creating content at a breakneck pace. Perhaps now I should stop calling him Adam, and instead call him by the ICON he is so well known for: Lawrence Florence. Lawrence is a brash and bold man, performing his most outlandish stunts and mundane tasks with the same trademark devilish grin. A commanding presence on any page, Lawrence emanates an aura that other ICONs describe as “a feeling that this is a man who knows exactly who he is.” As I sat on his couch in LA, watching him flip through channels on the TV while scrolling through glowing icons on his phone, Lawrence did seem like a man without doubts. I wondered if he ever worried about his image, if he ever stared at the bathroom mirror until his vision became too blurry to be anything but splashes of color. But as he continued to scroll and swipe, I knew he never did. This was not someone who faltered at reflections.
I asked Lawrence about how he started, and if he knew he was going to get this big. “I started watching Reel when it first came out, like I was one of the very first people to download the app,” he told me as he swiped through pictures of new cars on his phone. “I was hooked instantly and would spend hours every day thinking about different schemes and ideas to upload to my Instagram just so I could immediately send them to Reel to get voted on. If there was a new character I would immediately try and get my content to be the first, try and get my actions to come to define them. None of my content ever made it very far, though.” He looked up at me suddenly and stared for a few moments before telling me, “I didn’t know I was going to be popular on ICON, but as soon as I was popular, I knew it was meant to be. Everything started coming so naturally – I knew exactly what I had to say, do, and create. It’s almost like the app just told me. I tell people all the time – don’t scroll too far. Just tap.”
He looked back down at his phone. “I had to let go of a lot of things, a lot of things I used to do or like.” He motions towards the TV where Charlie stands frozen, his tongue outstretched to the wallpaper. “Like this movie. It’s the only movie I watched as a kid that I still watch now. I couldn’t let it go, I just like it so much. This scene in particular.”
